By
Associated Press
The Justice Department improperly withheld parts of an internal memorandum on the investigation of possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, a federal appeals panel released Friday.
This occurred when the department was under the command of former Attorney General William Barr, during the presidency of Donald Trump.
Barr spoke of the document when making statements to argue that Trump had not obstructed justice in that investigation.
She argued that the memorandum, from 2019, contained private deliberations by her lawyers before formalizing any decision, and therefore there was no obligation to release or disseminate it.
But a federal judge disagreed, ordering the Justice Department to give the document to a government transparency group that had sued it.
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At issue in the case is a March 24, 2019 memo from the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to assess whether evidence from the attorney's investigation special Robert Mueller could support the prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.
Barr has said he relied on that ruling to conclude that Trump did not unlawfully obstruct the Russia investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
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A year later, a federal judge sharply rebuked Barr's handling of the Mueller report, saying Barr had made "misleading public statements" to spin the investigation's conclusions in Trump's favor and displayed a "lack of candor."
The appeals court said Friday that the internal Justice Department memo noted that "Mueller had refused to charge President Trump with obstructing justice, but had also refused to exonerate him."
The internal memo said that "the report's failure to take a definitive position could be construed as an indictment of President Trump" if made public, the court wrote.
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The Justice Department provided other documents to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as part of the group's lawsuit, but refused to provide the memo.
Government lawyers said they were entitled under public records law to withhold the memo because it reflected internal deliberations before a formal decision had been made about what Mueller's evidence showed.
Sitting presidents are generally protected from criminal charges on the grounds that doing so would undermine their ability to perform the constitutional functions of the office.
The Justice Department, like Mueller, "assumed that the Constitution would prohibit the prosecution of a sitting president," the appeals court wrote, meaning that the decision that Trump would not be impeached had already been made and could not be protected from publication.
Had Justice Department officials made it clear to the court that the memo was related to Barr's decision to make a public statement about the report, the appeal panel wrote, rulings in the case might have been different.
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“Because the Department did not link the memorandum to deliberations on the decision at issue, it did not justify its reliance on the privilege of the deliberation process,” the panel of judges for the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit wrote.
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The appellate judges also noted that their ruling was "limited," and should not be read as "challenging any of our precedents that allow agencies to withhold draft documents related to public messaging."
